Status of SIP Communicator 1.0 development.

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-------------------- Periodic Status Letter 1
--------------------------

Hello all,

(Apologies to those getting the letter multiple times)

This is the first of (I hope) a series of status letters
meant to give
everyone a clear grasp of what's going on inside the
project. Each
letter would be summarizing things that have happened since
the last
one, outlining immediate goals and giving other news if
there are any. I
hope we'll be able to make this letter a lasting tradition
especially if
there's interest in it.

As a first letter this one is going to be slightly longer.
I'll try to 
keep the following letters short so that anyone could be
easily informed 
of project progress.

In this week's status letter I'll be going over the
following list of 
issues:

1. A look behind.
2. Where is the project currently standing and what has been
achieved.
3. What's cooking right now.
4. Immediate goals.

1. A look behind.

It's been a while now that we're working on the 1.0
version of the SIP
Communicator. I've started planning an OSGI based SIP
Communicator
somewhere in August 2004. Some attempts to simply port the
previous
(pre1.0) version over an OSGI environment without much
hassle were made
in the first half of 2005 ... without much success. What I
consider the
beginning of the 1.0 version is the first commit in the CVS
repository
of the sip-communicator-1-0-draft java.net project. This
happened on
_November_2nd_2006_ (at 14:09 to be exact). Since that day
work has
accumulated quite steadily:

http://dev.s
ip-communicator.org/loc.html

and today we are I believe not far from a first pre-release
(beta).

2. Where is the project currently standing and what has been
achieved.

Most important of all is the fact that we are now completely
OSGI based. 
All SIP Communicator modules are packaged as OSGI bundles
and all those 
that are supposed to export functionality do so as OSGI
services. We are 
using the Oscar (Felix) OSGI implementation and we have to
say that we 
are very happy with it (Kudos to Richard Hall and the new
Felix Apache 
Team). Thanks to all this it should now be very easy to
extend the SIP 
Communicator with your own plugins.

We also have a complete, very slick and nice GUI for instant
messaging 
and presence. We're also done with basic ICQ support,
message history, a 
meta contact list and other less significant but still
essential modules.

In other words we've got an IM client with quite a complete
(though 
basic) set of features.

3. What's cooking right now.

During the last couple of weeks Yana and Damian have almost
completed 
the history. So all messages are now logged and you are not
losing 
valuable info if you are chatting through the SIP
Communicator.

Damian has also created native installers for both Windows
and Linux 
using izPack. Their generator scripts are accessible through
the 
build.xml. The installers will shortly be published online
and made 
available through a nightly builds page.

Romain has completed his Mac OS X installation package and
started a 
nightly build that is now available for download here:

http://download.java.net/communications/
sip-communicator/nightly/macosx/

I'll be soon putting a link to this page on
sip-communicator.org

Something that may be of interest to many of you is the fact
that I've 
finally started work on implementing SIP support for SIP
Communicator 
1.0. I am using NIST's reference implementation of
jain-sip-1.2 
available here:

http://jain-sip.dev.java
.net

Things are going pretty smoothly as I am using
sip-communicator's old 
source tree as a very reliable guide. (We had expected that
it won't be 
a 1 to 1 port but despite that the old source code is
proving extremely 
valuable). I've sent and received my first SIP messages
today and expect 
to have a _basic_ telephony feature set in not very long.
End of 
September looks a like very very realistic deadline.

4. Immediate goals.

The very immediate goal is finalizing SIP, and the media
service and its 
implementation so that we could have basic telephony support
as soon as 
possible. During the following weeks I'll be giving you
more detailed 
feedback on how exactly we're moving on.

Once we're done with this, we will be having numerous
important issues 
to address in order to ensure reliability of the SIP
Communicator:

a) Firewall support

I've previewed work on a TURN implementation based on
stun4j 
(http://stun4j.dev.java.net
). Based on this implementation I will start 
work on an implementation of ICE and try and extend it so
that it would 
provide excellent firewall traversal (I am very confident we
could 
achieve impressive results here).

b) The MEDIA package

We'd need to have a look on JMF. I'll be doing the first
implementation 
of the media package on Sun's JMF RI because this seems
like the 
shortest path. We MUST however consider alternatives due to
JMF's status 
(i.e. the fact that it's been pretty much dead for the last
three years).

Is there anyone that would be willing to give (J)FFMPEG a
try?
FMJ (http://fmj.sourceforge.ne
t/) is also looking like a very promising 
alternative (last time I checked they were announcing
limited RTP 
support but I hope this would soon change).

c) sip-communicator.org

We'd need to have our site cleaned up as there are
currently lots of 
redundant and outdated pages. Any assistance or feedback on
this issue 
would be greatly appreciated.

I don't know the exact reason but sip-communicator.org
seems to be 
completely ignored by Google (most possibly because it is
ignored by 
users 
). Try a google search for

SIP Communicator

And you'll notice that the development site on java.net is
returned as a 
first result and that sip-communicator.org's main page is
nowhere to be 
seen. Any suggestions on how best to address that would be
most welcome.

d) Looking for package maintainers.

Finally, as I've just mentioned we already have a Mac OS X,
a Windows 
and a generic Linux installation packages. I don't need to
say that it 
would be extremely nice to have specific Linux installation
packages for 
all major Linux distributions as well as other operating
systems such as 
BSD for example. Any volunteers to create and maintain such
packages 
would be most welcome!

Okay. I think that's enough for this time.

Thanks for reading this far!

Cheers
Emil Ivov

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Emil Ivov wrote:
> -------------------- Periodic Status Letter 1
--------------------------
<snip/>

Great news, Emil. Thanks for taking the time to explain.
Every time I 
found a spare hour over the last couple of weeks, I've been
reluctant to 
work on the project because the CVS activity has been so
great.

In particular, I noticed the list of included jars has
changed a lot and 
  I need to update the netBeans IDE configuration to match
the current 
state. Could you let me know when you feel this particular
area has 
stabilised to a meaningful extent - I don't need
perfection.

I've also held off on my work with the ICQ test environment
error 
handling because I noticed a lot of activity in that area.
I'll take 
another look if you all have moved over to the SIP area of
the project.

As usual, I don't have a lot of free time, but I want to
make it count.

Regards, Brian

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Hey Brian,

Brian Burch wrote:
> In particular, I noticed the list of included jars has
changed a lot and 
>   I need to update the netBeans IDE configuration to
match the current 
> state. Could you let me know when you feel this
particular area has 
> stabilised to a meaningful extent - I don't need
perfection.

I think it is relatively stable now. I guess there are a few
pending 
updates for sip-sdp.jar but the name won't be changing so
that shouldn't 
bother you. The jars for jdic are also going to be updated
because Yana 
told me she would be working on a systray after her vacation
but it 
won't be a big change.

> I've also held off on my work with the ICQ test
environment error 
> handling because I noticed a lot of activity in that
area. I'll take 
> another look if you all have moved over to the SIP area
of the project.

Yes I guess no one would be touching ICQ in the weeks to
come so feel 
free to invade it. You would probably notice that I did add
support for 
a single flag that would make the ICQ slick forget about
tests requiring 
an Internet connection. I remember you had some thoughts
against such an 
option but I really felt that the tests were taking too long
for 
developers to run them upon each compilation, which is
something that I 
hope everyone would do (and besides you didn't insist much
;) ).

> As usual, I don't have a lot of free time, but I want
to make it count.

This has always been the case! Your contributions have
always been 
meaningful and very responsible, which I believe is
essential. Thank you 
for your efforts. And thanks everyone else for your great
work.

We're almost there!

Emil
> 
> Regards, Brian
> 
>
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> 
> 

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Please, when replying to this letter make sure your response
goes _only_
to devsip-communicator.dev.java.net


-------------------- Periodic Status Letter 2
--------------------------

Hello all,

(Apologies to those getting the letter multiple times)

This periodic letter contains information on the state of
the SIP 
Communicator project and its development. It includes a
summary of the 
progress that has been made since the last edition of the
letter and a 
short range plan of what are the next items on our agenda.

Let's start with an overview of what we've been doing lately
(in no 
particular order):

The message history is now completely finalized and (should
be) stable. 
Yana and Damian have worked hard on this and I think we now
really have 
slick history.

We have officially frozen the sip-communicator-1-0-draft
java.net 
project and its cvs repository. This project was beginning
to cause 
quite some confusion and the pre1.0 code in the
sip-communicator CVS 
repository was driving users away from the current version.
The move was 
  to a great extent eased by CollabNet that agreed to copy
the 1-0-draft 
repository over that of the sip-communicator completely free
of charge.

The SIP Communicator now also supports the Jabber protocol
(courtesy of 
Damian). So those of us using, jabber.org, google talk or
any other 
jabber service have one less reason to run a second IM
client side by 
side with the sip-communicator. We still need to give some
testing to 
this module and work some more on it (you'll notice for
example that it 
uses that icq animated icon for a short period during the
login) but the 
better part of work is behind us. Anyway, I was personally
very eager to 
have Jabber support so I am really glad it's there  ).

SIP support has also moved forward. We now have exchange of
SIP messages 
(INVITE, TRYING, RINGING, OK) during the automated testing.
We should 
move faster here during the next week or two.

We have also started nightly builds of a windows and a Linux
installer 
(note that the Linux installer is only a self extracting
executable and 
not a distro specific package ... these should come later).
The nightly 
builds are stored on download.java.net, and more precisely:

http://download.java.net/communications/sip-com
municator/nightly/

Last but not least, we have passed over the mark of 100 000
lines of 
code! 
It may sound meaningless to many but since we don't yet have
a 
release and are not counting downloads or page hits, this is
one of the 
primary indexes we use to measure our progress. Here's a
more visual 
representation of this progress:

http://dev.s
ip-communicator.org/loc.html

(I am not getting tired of sending out this one  )

So, what's next?

I may have mentioned that. We're planning the release of the
1.0-alpha1 
version (for details check the project roadmap: 
http://www.sip-communicator.org/index.php/Developme
nt/Roadmap) quite 
soon (a matter of weeks really).

We're therefore now concentrating on the SIP protocol
provider, the GUI 
for all telephony features and the Call history.

We'll also be trying to put up nightly builds for .deb and
.rpm packages.


I guess this pretty much sums it up.

Thanks for reading!

Emil

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